Percursos religiosos e adesão: comunidades urbanas da IECLB como estudo de caso

Abstract

Religious mobility is a recent phenomenon and has become one of the main factors which modify the Brazilian religious field, which can be characterized by a scenario of religious diversification and pluralism. In modernity, the modifications in the field produce new configurations of religion, of believing and of belonging. The traditional churches are reached by these movements, especially in the urban areas. In this sense, this theses deals with the adhesion to the Igreja Evangélica de Confissão Luterana no Brasil (IECLB) [Evangelical Church of Lutheran Confession in Brazil] in urban congregations, through an empirical-qualitative research which addresses the religious journeys and modalities of belonging and joining in three congregations which served as a case study. Besides the religious journeys, we sought to decipher the motivations, the levels of participation and integration, the exclusive or twofold relation with the chosen religious community. We problematized the phenomenon of religious migration through concepts such as conversion, passage or joining, in a religious field in which adhesion by attribution loses space to acquired adhesion. The survey of data points to religious mobility which propitiates different modalities of aggregation and belonging comprehended by the new religious identity, revealing adhesions by family (Sapucaia do Sul/RS), by individuals (São Luís/MA), or momentary, partial and mobile (Rio de Janeiro/RJ). We identified that the religious migration and adhesion, in these congregations, through family or personal choice, reveal that the transmitter element of religion no longer occurs through symbolic ties, such as tradition and ethnicity, which reveals a church which, slowly, is changing, in the Brazilian context, substituting these traditional elements of adhesion with theological and confessional ones, for an open and universal ecclesial proposal. In this sense, based on the case studies, we list challenges and opportunities for urban congregations of the IECLB, which, upon receiving persons with dynamic and accentuated religious journeys, becomes a chosen religious space for living out the faith.